Apple Acquires Spotsetter, A Social Maps Company

Spotsetter was a maps app
that reflected what you and your friends do.Spotsetter.com

Apple has purchased Spotsetter, a social search engine that uses
big data to offer personalized recommendations for places to go.
The terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed, but
the news was
first reported by TechCrunch.

Apple will likely use Spotsetter to bolster its own homegrown
Maps application. Last summer, Apple picked up a handful of
mapping and navigation companies — including HopStop, Embark,
Locationary, WiFiSLAM and BroadMap — for a presumably similar
purpose.

According to TechCrunch, a big part of the Spotsetter deal
involves the two founders behind the startup: Stephen Tse is an
ex-Google Maps engineer and Johnny Lee has
worked as a former consultant at Siemens and former CTO at
FitFiend, a social network for fitness professionals.

Spotsetter was designed to combine recommendations from friends
with trusted reviews and other data to create more social maps.
It would show you which friends were “experts” in a given area,
and you could tag your friends as experts (like LinkedIn) to
boost the influence of their recommendations. You could also
discover new places by browsing Spotsetter’s maps to see where
your friends have been and what they’ve recommended.

Thanks to a patent-pending algorithm, Spotsetter was able
to pull in data fron social networks like Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter and Foursquare, as well as venue information from more
than 30 review sites like Yelp, TripAdviser, Zagat and The New
York Times.

Last summer, Spotsetter said it had processed 5 million
user profiles, 40 million venues and 1 million curated venue
content items globally.

With fondest emotions, I’m announcing that we are closing down
Spotsetter app. We still have big dreams for personalized search
for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this
area. Thank you everyone for your support over the past years!

TechCrunch said Apple and Spotsetter had been discussing a deal
for some time, but the deal “quickly closed last week after other
companies found out and became interested.”